By now I’ve read Binary Star twice, and I’ve become so entwined with it that I’m reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I’ve never read anything like it. — Harry Mathews

I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard’s brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy, devastated, loving all of it. — Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines

Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard’s young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity—ideological, mental, physical—comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is “I want to look at the sky and understand.” —Justin Taylor, author of Flings

A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way. — Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard’s first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage. — Simon Van Booy, author of The Illusion of Separateness

Haints Stay is the story of two brothers, Brooke and Sugar, one of whom is pregnant with the other’s child. After the two middling bounty hunters are chased from town due to a bathhouse brawl, they encounter Bird — a boy who mysteriously appears in their camp with no memory and palms as smooth as stones. As the past races to catch up with them, each sets off in pursuit of their own peculiar sense of justice and belonging. An acid Western in the tradition of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Kelly Reichart’sMeek’s Cutoff, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, the novel features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, young love, a wagon train, stampedes, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger.

In addition to being called “…the most anticipated American independent novel…” by Flavorwire, the novel was a Rumpus Book Club pick for May and a #brazosbest pick by Brazos Bookstore for June.

The book’s trailer, by filmmaker David Formentin, premiered at Flavorwire and can be viewed here.

“Haints Stay puts to mind the very best contemporary novels of the old West, including those by powerhouses like Charles Portis, Patrick DeWitt, Robert Coover, Oakley Hall, E.L. Doctorow and Sheriff Cormac McCarthy himself, not to mention Thomas McGuane’s classic screenplays for The Missouri Breaks and Tom Horn. But Colin Winnette has his own dark and delightful and surprising agenda Be wary. He might be the new law in town.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask.

“From his curiously harrowing Animal Collection to the glorious guts of Fondly, I trust wherever Colin Winnette’s imagination sees fit to take me. And now — with Haints Stay — we venture to the lawless old West for a story stitched out of animal skins and language that glimmers like blood diamonds. This is a dangerous novel; let’s read it and risk our lives together.”—Saeed Jones

“This is the kind of refreshing, bizarre, remorseless story the Western genre needs. …Winnette’s truly effective trick is that he can build a world so wild (where no one is spared the unrelenting violence) out of complex characters that you genuinely grow to care for, making what they endure so much more wince-inducing and blood pressure-raising.”—Askmen.com

“The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling. Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty.”—The Lit Pub

“Life is nasty, brutish, and short in this noir-tinged Western… that falls somewhat uncomfortably between ‘Deadwood’ and The Crying Game. It sounds like a cross between Daniel Woodrell and Elmore Leonard right up until Winnette flips the script.”—Kirkus Reviews